Let's Get Reading: Newsletter 74

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But, something forces you to anyway.” – James Baldwin

Tick Tock, it’s the Doomsday Clock

This week, I read and reviewed a book that had a certain nuclear flavour to it (see below), and it gave me an excuse to talk about one of my favourite literary anecdotes of all-time. Seriously, I’ve been meaning to do a piece on this basically since I launched this newsletter. So without further ado, here it is, the crazy symbiosis between the Doomsday Clock and publication rates of dystopian fiction.

If you’ve ever felt like every time the world takes a turn for the worse, the bookstores fill up with novels about tyrannical governments, collapsed ecosystems, or teenage revolutions – well, your instincts are probably right. Back in 1947, a group of atomic scientists created a metaphor to visualize how close we are to self-destruction: the Doomsday Clock.